The Attempting of Explaining Acquiring the Skill of Writing
尝试解释学习写作技巧

Five or six years ago, I read a piece by Aristotle about two ways of knowing – nous and episteme. According to my memory, the difference is divided by the possibility of ‘imparting’: nous is more intuitional, individual and unknowable, i.e. more ‘mystical’ and episteme closer to knowledge in common sense. Here, I will try to transform the nous into episteme in the essay.
五到六年前，我读过亚里士多德的一篇文章，关于认识的两种方式——nous 和 episteme。根据我的记忆，它们的区别在于“传授”的可能性：nous 更具直观性、个体性和不可知性，即更神秘，而 episteme 更接近常识中的知识。在这里，我将在文章中尝试将 nous 转化为 episteme。

I agree that most learning behaviour happens unconsciously. While reading or writing an essay, I am trying to find an answer to the theme the lecturer gives me. While listening to or reading some theoretical statements, the actual feeling inside me is understanding – I can somehow find examples for most rational hypotheses introduced. I made a list of skills I picked up: drawing, skating and cooking, which I do not even know what happened; calligraphy, a font called Kurrent, mere recurring labour; cycling and swimming, too long ago to recall. It sounds like nous fleets into the subconscious most of the time. Nevertheless, after comparing the activities above to answer the question called ‘‘Why I do not consider them as the samples of ‘skill learning’’’, I recognise that, for me, the feeling of learning is composed by observing the material, analysing for an orientation and adjusting my actions. Ironically, playing the Souls Games is one of the only two activities in which I do all those above simultaneously.
我同意大部分学习行为都是无意识的。在阅读或撰写论文时，我试图找到讲师给我主题的答案。在听或阅读一些理论陈述时，我内心的真实感受是理解——我可以找到大多数理性假设的实例。我列出了我学到的一些技能：绘画、滑冰和烹饪，我甚至不知道发生了什么；书法，使用了一种名为 Kurrent 的字体，只是重复的劳动；骑自行车和游泳，时间太久远，记不清了。这听起来像是大部分时候，我的思维都潜入了潜意识。然而，当我将上述活动与回答问题“为什么我不认为它们是‘技能学习’的样本”进行比较时，我认识到，对我来说，学习的感觉是由观察材料、分析方向和调整行动组成的。讽刺的是，玩《魂》系列游戏是我唯一同时进行上述所有活动的活动之一。

Let us focus on the other, more universal one: episteme of writing - utilising observing, analysing, and adjusting in that domain to explain how I did that. Firstly, I would like to praise the work which affected my style most: Kundra’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. As a quasi-romance took place in Czech around 1968, with a tragic atmosphere and implicit restlessness, Kundra wrote: ‘In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.’ The ‘sunset’ and the ‘guillotine’, which indicate a gloomy future of the characters, the fated ‘dissolution’ waiting for the sovereignty of Bohemia, and the ‘nostalgia’ resonance with Kundra’s status of writing the work in Franch and France as a Czech – all imageries merged with the aura of the story. From this book, I acquired the skill of ‘white place’: the atmosphere is what I aim to convey through my words, which is more potent than details. Conversely, Murakami’s 1Q84 is annoying: in the first chapter, the heroine hears Janáček’s Sinfonietta, of which she ‘naturally’ recalled a series of details – ‘like a flock of birds swooping through an opening window’. It is a beautiful and vivid metaphor that always reminds me of a bright lobby with a skylight, in the middle of which sits the heroine, and those birds (metaphorical objects of the knowledge about the piece) land around her. I do not consider it over-interpreted, for it is an example of the ‘white space’ I mentioned above. What is precisely interpreted by individuals does not matter; the ‘feeling’ the author is trying to sketch does. However, at that moment, the heroine is sitting in a taxi, stuck on the Metropolitan Expressway with an important appointment. The unpolished blunt jumping of scenes and emotions makes the general effect almost reject me from engaging, which makes me conclude that the metaphor here is nothing but skills showing off. From this lousy metaphor, I can deeply understand that, to write vigorously, people must delete all sentences that cannot serve the plot, scene and emotion, no matter how pretty, elegant or euphuistic they are.
让我们聚焦于另一个更普遍的概念：写作的知识——在那个领域利用观察、分析和调整来解释我是如何做到的。首先，我想赞扬对我风格影响最大的工作：昆德拉的《生命中不能承受之轻》。大约在 1968 年的捷克，一场半虚构的浪漫故事发生，带有悲剧氛围和隐含的不安，昆德拉写道：“在解体的黄昏，一切都被怀旧的光环照亮，甚至断头台。”“黄昏”和“断头台”暗示着角色们阴暗的未来，预示着捷克主权的“解体”，而“怀旧”与昆德拉在法国写作这部作品时作为捷克人的身份感产生了共鸣。所有这些意象都与故事的氛围融合在一起。从这本书中，我学会了“白色空间”的技巧：气氛是我通过文字想要传达的，比细节更为有力。相反，村上的《1Q84》则令人恼火：在第一章中，女主角听到了雅纳切克的《小交响曲》，她“自然”地回忆起了一系列细节——“就像一群鸟从打开的窗户飞过”。 这是一句美丽而生动的比喻，总让我想起一个明亮的大厅，大厅中央有一扇天窗，女主角就坐在那里，那些鸟（关于作品的知识的象征物）围绕着她降落。我认为这不是过度解读，因为它是我上面提到的“空白空间”的一个例子。个人具体解读的内容并不重要，作者试图描绘的“感觉”才是关键。然而，在那一刻，女主角坐在出租车里，被困在都市高速公路，有一个重要的约会。场景和情感的粗糙不连贯的跳跃使得整体效果几乎让我拒绝参与，这让我得出结论，这里的比喻只是技巧的炫耀。从这个糟糕的比喻中，我深刻理解到，为了写得有力，人们必须删除所有不能服务于情节、场景和情感的句子，无论它们多么漂亮、优雅或文雅。

Bourdieu accurately pointed out that the practice is ‘involved in the countless minute choices’, though all existence has paradigms – writing, as well as habitus, is genitive and has limits. In proof of this, I have explained why a writer should describe the atmosphere rather than details, how the atmosphere works and how skill showing off can deteriorate the works.
布尔迪厄准确地指出，实践“涉及无数细微的选择”，尽管所有存在都有范式——写作，以及习性，都是生成性的，并且有其局限性。为了证明这一点，我已经解释了为什么作家应该描述氛围而不是细节，氛围是如何运作的，以及如何展示技巧会损害作品。